Segmented Essays free essay sample

Like musical compositions, nonfiction need not to be one uninterrupted melody, one movement, but can also be the arrangement of distinct and discrete miniatures, changes of temp, sonority, melody, separated by silences. Think of a triptych like Hieronymus Bosch’s three-part masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights, with its large central section displaying â€Å"The World before Noah,† one side panel depicting â€Å"The Marriage of Adam and Eve,† the other depicting â€Å"Hell. Like a polyptych painting, nonfiction need not be one self-contained and harmonious picture but can also be an arrangement of separate images, a retable or reredos of scenes and portraits collectively viewed but separated by borders and frames. The spaces in a segmented essay are like the silences between songs on a recording, the use of emptiness in a photographs to highlight or foreground images, the time lapse between two hyperlinks on a website, the time it takes to shift focus fro m one facet of a multifaceted object to another, the breaks between poems in a sonnet sequence. We will write a custom essay sample on Segmented Essays or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page We learn what we learn, we know what we know, we experience what we live in segments and sections, fragments, moments, movements, periods, disjunctions, and juxtapositions. The inventions and manipulations of character and plot that are the hallmark of the novelist’s creativity are the barriers of the nonfictionist’s psychology; the willingness to settle for the fictionist’s â€Å"higher truth through fabrication† negates the nonfictionist’s chances of even visiting the vicinity of the kind of earthbound and actual truth that is nonfiction’s special province. This is what the spaces say: arrange the viewing of the panels so that you see their relationships in the juxtapositions rather than in a unified unbroken whole; linger your thoughts on the melody just ended before you hear the one about to begin; expect to know whatever this essay is about in the same way you know anything else, in fragments of certainty and segments of supposition, surrounded by gaps in your knowledge and borders of uncertainty.